Beijing, China - The officially atheist government of China has given itself a new cause, which is to promote the country’s image as an important centre of Buddhism. This is evident from the latest move involving the display of two relics that are said to be from the Sakyamuni’s body.
The government on Tuesday decided to make public the relics that had been kept out of public gaze in an underground vault of the Capital Museum in Beijing. The relics have been returned to the Beijing Yunju Temple, where they were found in the first place.
The government has also given permission to the temple to exhibit the relics till July 2. This is a significant move because the government has kept them away from public view since they were discovered in a cave inside the 5th century temple in 1981.
Chinese authorities have taken several other similar measures in recent months. In early June, it ordered restoration of a thousand-yearold site called the “Caves of Thousand Buddhas”, near the city of Turpan in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. This is the biggest effort to renovate the site since 1949 when the atheist state of the People’s Republic of China was established.
Communist leaders have also promoted a World Buddhism Conference for two successive years with the dual purpose of attracting the attention of Buddhists across the world while trying to establish that Tibetan Buddhism can stand on its own without the Dalai Lama.
“I hope the traditional culture can be passed on through viewing the Buddha relics. I hope people’s hearts can be purified,” Chuan Yin, a senior monk at the Beijing Yunju Temple said after performing the ceremony for receiving the relics from the government-run museum. The “corn-shaped red Buddha body relics” are seen as one of the three precious sets of relics in China.